


In Your Eyes

by orphan_account, therewasagirl



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Alternate Reality, Alternate Universe, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-04
Updated: 2016-04-18
Packaged: 2018-05-31 03:22:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,198
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6453376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account, https://archiveofourown.org/users/therewasagirl/pseuds/therewasagirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Felicity Smoak, IT expert for Queen Consolidated, is brilliant, independent, and blind. Through her friend Tommy Merlyn, she meets Oliver Queen, the CEO of QC with a dark past. Eventually, she must work with him to unveil a conspiracy within the company that runs deeper and is more sinister than it may at first appear. As they get to know each other better, emotions ensue.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Oliver Queen walked into the restaurant in the middle of the day on a Tuesday. He had received a text from Tommy, telling him to catch him and ‘a friend’ there if he was in the neighborhood.

Oliver had been there before, though he remembered it used to look different. The place had changed decor and had changed names a couple of times as well, but the view was the same. The open floor plan allowed the three sides of high glass windows to make the diners feel as though they were halfway up in the sky. The downtown skyline was an amazing view even by day.

His family used to frequent the place for lunches once a month that became a loathsome tradition as Oliver grew older - one that he usually survived only by devoting the entire measure of his attention to Thea.

As he walked further in, the sound of clattering silverware and the low hum of conversation broken by gentle laughter started getting clearer. One specific sound broke through the rest, though. He’d recognize the sound of his best friend’s laugh anywhere.   

He grimaced when he saw Tommy sitting right by one of the large windows that faced three different buildings higher than this one. _Doesn’t he know he’s putting himself right in the line of fire?_ Oliver then mentally kicked himself for thinking it. There was no reason for Tommy to think that way.

Tommy sat back in his chair, relaxed and smiling so wide that his cheeks must have been hurting. He looked as animated as ever, talking cheerfully with his hands. Oliver’s eyes traveled to the woman sitting across from Tommy that had to  be the friend he referenced in his text. She was a small, pretty woman. Oliver had difficulty deciding which was brighter, her blond hair her her purple lipstick . He didn’t recognize her as any of their old friends, but Tommy looked very familiar and comfortable with her.

Oliver knew better than most how infectious Tommy’s good humor could be, and he was wholly unsurprised to see the blonde reacting in kind. Her smile was bright and genuine, and Oliver heard her soft laughter all the way from where he was standing. Her movements were what caught Oliver’s trained eye, though, and gave him pause. In direct contrast to the relaxed smile on her face, her spine was rigid, her movements careful - almost as though she were bracing herself against the world. In an odd way, her movements reminded him of his own.

He stood and watched the two of them for 30 seconds, feeling like an intruder on their happy moment. As he realized what he’s doing, he moved, tugging at the sleeve of his shirt in a bit of discomfort and rolling his shoulder. Just as he made the decision to join them, Tommy looked up and spotted him. In what Oliver thought was an impossibility, Tommy’s smile stretched even bigger.

“Hey, Oliver!”

Tommy got up and strode towards him. Oliver knew just by the way his best friend looked at him that he was going to go for a hug and for once, the thought didn’t set his teeth on edge. Tommy told Oliver that he was missed only once, but the way he held him just a little bit tighter than usual every time they did that bro-hug thing kept repeating it. They walked back towards the table together, bumping shoulders. The blonde woman sat there, fairly expressionless.

“Felicity?”

Oliver did a double take at Tommy’s tone. He’d  never heard Tommy speak to anyone else like this. Not to his girlfriend. Not to his mother, or any of his friends. Not even to Oliver.

His voice was _gentle._ Careful. The way you’d speak to someone you didn’t want to startle.

The blonde - Felicity - smiled. “Hey, Tommy, where’d you go? I was - “

“Hi.” Oliver interrupted her, smirking. For some reason, Tommy’s gentleness towards her made him want to interfere. Something about her told him that she wasn’t breakable, and a part of him wanted to challenge his best friend on that.

Her reaction to the interruption was a little perplexing to Oliver, though. She stiffened in her perch at the edge of her seat, and for a second, she seemed to lose that cautious composure. It wasn’t  something anyone else would notice, but Oliver did. He always noticed.

“Felicity, this is Oliver Queen, I told you I was friends with him...Oliver, this is Felicity Smoak,” Tommy said cheerfully.

“Tommy didn’t tell me _anything_ about you,” Oliver reassured Felicity, winking and smiling at her. It was charming and _cheap_ , the same brand that put everyone at ease and usually earned him quite a few points with the ladies.

He felt Tommy’s elbow jab him between his ribs. Not as sharp as Thea’s, but the action itself was familiar enough to throw Oliver back five years into the past, when he and Tommy used to share whole conversations with just one look. Oliver didn’t really need to look at  his friend to know why this time.

Felicity nodded, her smile the picture of politeness and not even close to what it had been before he stepped into the picture. Oliver furrowed his brow, frowning.

Despite popular opinion, he wasn’t high enough on his own good looks to think that every person in existence must find him attractive, nor did his pride hurt too badly at her lack of appraisal. But Felicity’s reaction to him was unusual, and he wasn’t used to it. She didn’t look him up and down. She didn’t size him up in attempt to determine if he was really as attractive as he appeared on first glance, the way he’d been so used to other people doing. She stared right _through_ him, almost as though…..almost as though she wasn’t seeing him at all.

“It’s very nice to meet you, Mr. Queen. I _have_ heard a lot about you.” Her tone was as impassive as her expression, and for one surreal moment he was reminded of his mother and the patronizing quality of her calmness every time she asked him to sit down.

Irritation crawled along the seams of his nerves and it didn’t really matter that it had nothing to do with her.

“Come on, sit! Join us! Felicity here is the crown jewel of your IT department, actually, so I’m sure you guys will have what to talk about,” Tommy said, an easy grin on his face.  

“I wouldn't really go that far as to say crown jewel,” Felicity said, as Oliver sat in the empty chair near Tommy. “Besides, IT and management don’t really have that much in common, you know. I only know three people in QC, and they’re all members of my department.”

“Yeah, because you think the rest of the people who work there are, how did you put it? ‘Bumbling idiots?’” Tommy said.

“That’s a glowing recommendation of QC,” Oliver said, laughter in his voice.

“I never said that, of course I don’t think you’re a bumbling idiot. Well, okay, I did say that I think _some_ of your employees are bumbling idiots, but they’re the kinds who don’t do their jobs and leave staplers on the floor.” She said all of it quickly, almost babbling, but not quite.

“I’ll see to it that a new rule is instituted at QC - anybody who leaves staplers on the floor is automatically fired,” Oliver responded, his tone teasing. Felicity smiled, a lot more genuine than before.  

“While you’re busy making changes, maybe you could help Felicity get bumped up to Applied Sciences, you know. She’s always wanted to work there, she’s been bored in IT,” Tommy said cheerfully.

Felicity angled her head towards Tommy slightly, the smile sliding off her face, her expression almost severe. The silence lasted only for a moment, but it was so awkward that not even Tommy’s hurried ‘I was joking, Felicity’ could wash it away completely, despite the very clear apology in his voice.

“Oliver and I have known each other since we were kids, he knows when I’m making a joke.” Tommy said then, his voice pitched lower. She didn’t give an inch. The smile that curled her lips up was so perfunctory, it might as well have not been there at all. Oliver didn’t understand exactly why she was upset, until she spoke again.

“I know that, Tommy, but Mr. Queen is still my boss, in a way. And that was very unprofessional.”

_Ah. She wants to work her way up herself. Got it._ It wasn’t an unusual sentiment, particularly not in QC where the previous status quo had been that - every once in awhile - promotions were handed out based on who was fucking Oliver’s father at the time. Robert Queen’s attitude towards QC was what had given Oliver his utter distaste for working there to begin with. Even now, reminders of his father’s debauchery were plastered everywhere he went, particularly on the faces of people who his father had fucked and fucked over, and in - God help him - the computer system.

“Don’t worry, Miss Smoak.” It just occurred to him that she’d not said his name once and that he hadn't asked permission to use hers. “I won’t take Tommy’s lack of a sense of humor for a representation of your deepest desires.” _Oh fuck. That came out wrong._

Before he could say anything else and add to this clusterfuck, Tommy saved him. “What are you talking about? I’m hilarious,” he said, righteously indignant.

“Sure you are. When you’re drunk,” Oliver quipped.  

They both held the conversation in this joking vein for a while, teasing each other about some poor drunken decisions in their past just to let the last wisps of the awkwardness from before fade away completely.

Felicity didn’t re-enter the conversation actively after that though, despite Tommy’s gentle coaxing or Oliver’s more direct questions. It was borderline stupid for that to feel so much like a rejection to Oliver, when she was practically a stranger and a perfectly polite one. But there was something beneath the way she refused to engage that felt almost like a dismissal, just a bit more personal than that.

It felt like she didn’t want to talk to him at all.

The sound of her phone beeping interrupted Tommy mid-sentence. She picked it up without looking at it. “Whoops, my break is over. I’m gonna head back to work now.”

“Do you want me to walk you back?” Tommy asked swiftly, glancing at Oliver with an unreadable look on his face.

“No, no, I’m fine, don’t worry. It was very nice to meet you, Mr. Queen…” She spoke as her hand groped around in her bag, obviously looking for something. As she found what she was looking for, she slowly stood up, slinging the strap of her bag over her shoulder in a very practiced move.

When she unfolded the object in her hands, for one flash of a second, Oliver was reminded of the baton that an old friend of his used to use.

“Bye, Tommy! See you next week. Goodbye, Mr. Queen.” Felicity stood up slowly and began to walk towards the door of the restaurant, extending the long stick out in front of her. Oliver watched her pause at the revolving door, reach her hand up to feel for it, and push it around as she exited the restaurant.

  
Little things about her that had made no sense previously suddenly clicked for Oliver. Felicity’s careful, deliberate movements. Her eyes that looked through him, past him, instead of at him. The way Tommy spoke to her. The alarm that had alerted her that she had to get back to work, something most people wouldn’t need. It all made sense to him.  

_She was blind._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We plan to update every Sunday by 9pm. Comments and reviews are welcome and feed our muse! 
> 
> Find us on Tumblr:  
> honorthedeadbyfighting.tumblr.com  
> yellowflicker09011996.tumblr.com


	2. Chapter 2

In the life of Felicity Smoak, bad days weren’t uncommon occurrences. There was always that one variable - the one that couldn’t be accounted for - that inevitably fucked everything up. Sometimes it was her mother deciding to call at the _worst_ time to check in on her - aka, to interrogate her about her nonexistent love life. Other times it was her so-called supervisor who felt it necessary to slide in compliments about just how good she was at her job - _for a blind woman._

And of course, she couldn’t call it a day if she hadn’t stepped into a puddle of water yet. Or dog poop. Or some other questionable material lying on the ground of Starling City. Her dog always prevented her from walking into oncoming traffic, but he was a little lacking in alerting her of any imminent damage to her shoes.

Today, Felicity wasn’t sure what the ‘ick’ variable was. Nothing disastrous like stepping in dog poop had happened, her mother hadn’t called, and everything else was running as smoothly as possible. But there was something gnawing at her, a restlessness that she didn’t even know the origin of. Or….she did, but was determinedly _not thinking about._ Because if she thought about it, she would talk herself out of going to work.

And just like that, she was thinking about it.

Meeting Oliver Queen had been incredibly unsettling to begin with. He was her best friend’s best friend, the man whose name was on every person in Starling City’s lips, and most importantly, her boss. Of course he had made her nervous just by walking into the restaurant. Tommy’s comment to Oliver about Felicity wanting a job in Applied Sciences? That had been enough to make Felicity want to throw herself off a cliff and never go to work again (in that order). Mr. Queen might have laughed it off, and Tommy might have believed it, but Felicity had heard the way his voice had lowered for a moment after. Just the thought of being considered that kind of climber made her ears sting with embarrassment.

It would also be nice to be able to move on from being so self conscious about her eyes all the time. She had practically felt Mr. Queen looking quizzically at Tommy when she tried to lift her face in his general direction. He probably thought she looked like a zombie. She wondered what he had decided about her skills as a member of his company upon figuring out that she was blind.

Sighing, Felicity climbed out of bed. What was the likelihood that she’d have to face Mr. Queen anyway? She had worked in QC for 6 months, and had never met him before yesterday. Statistically, the odds were in her favor, so there was no use moping around over it all day. She could already hear her helper clanging around in the kitchen, which meant she had to hurry. It was time to go adult in the real world.

 

* * *

 

By 2:30pm, Felicity had a headache the size of Australia - that is, of course, if headaches could be measured the same way continents could. The sound of the computerized voice reading everything that was on screen to her through her headphones at 400 words per minute usually gave her a mild twinge by her temples as the day progressed, but today for some reason her head was _pounding_ from it. Not for the first time, she wished she had Morgan Freeman’s voice reading the coding in her ear instead.

She pulled off her headphones to rest for a minute, actively preventing herself from reaching for the Advil bottle.

The sound of the carpet rustling wouldn’t have surprised her quite so much any other time, but resurfacing from the world of code just to realize that someone had been there staring for who knows how long was both startling and quite annoying. She waited ten long seconds for whoever was there to make themselves known, and after the first five, had to resist the impulse of mentally rolling her eyes. It was an old joke at this point that people still felt the need to make. Test the blind girl, see if she really knows you’re there.

It never stopped amusing her that each and every one of them thought they were the first to try it.

“Can I do something for you?” She tried with only partial success to keep the irritation from her voice.

Felicity would be lying if she said she didn't get some amount of pleasure from people’s startled yelps when her awareness caught them by surprise, or even better, freaked them out, but this time it didn’t come. The amused voice of Oliver Queen was what greeted her in response.

“Actually yes, there is something you can do for me, Ms. Smoak. I find myself in need of some help.” he said, walking closer to her.

_Fuck statistics,_ Felicity thought. The variable that couldn’t have been taken into account was Mr. Queen seeking her out at work. Outstanding, really.

“It depends on what you need. I can’t help you if you need a lesson in archery, for instance, but I am pretty good at IT.”

She heard him exhale a stilted laugh and start approaching her. It was four steps from the door of her cubicle to her desk. He crossed it in two.

“Then you _are_ the person I’m looking for. My computer died on me last night for some reason.  Do you think you could take a look at it?”

This time, in Felicity’s mind, she rolled her eyes so hard that they got stuck in the back of her head.

Yeah, right. Why was he coming to _her?_ Felicity was one of the main coders of this department, which meant she was supposed to be free of explaining to people how to plug in laptops to recharge them. The days when she had to debug laptops and explain basics were supposed to be over too, but that was Oliver Queen standing there and she supposed if you owned a Fortune 500 company, you could afford to waste anyone’s time.

“Of course,” she said, in her best professional voice.  

He placed the laptop carefully on her desk. Felicity could sense his hand lingering there for a moment, as if he were going to help her find the laptop. She resisted the urge to tell him that her other senses still existed.

“So how’d you and Tommy meet?” Oliver asked casually, withdrawing his hand.

_Ah. So that’s why he’s really here,_ Felicity thought. He was trying to dig into her and Tommy’s friendship.

“You mean you didn’t interrogate him about me the second I left the restaurant?”

“I asked him if he was sleeping with you, he punched me, so I figured I’d abandon that line of questioning.”

Felicity felt her jaw drop, and a second later she started laughing. The whole thing felt so random that for a moment she forgot the previous formality she’d been so careful about cultivating, the one that had inhibited her from speaking her mind to her boss.

“Me...and Tommy? Sleeping together?” She snorted not very attractively, but she found that, as opposed to her earlier concern about what he thought of her eyes, this time she couldn’t care less.

“Why else would he care about you so much? Tommy’s not the kind to have friends,” he threw out, with a kind of carelessness that was almost callous. “Couldn't figure out another reason for it.”

_Ouch._ Just like that, the smile slid off Felicity’s face. Her fingers tightened around the cord that she had just pulled out of her neat lineup of cables, and her heart fell in her chest. Of course. Because the only way anyone would care about her would be if he or she were sleeping with her, right?

On its way down, the hurt she swallowed condensed very quickly into irritation, and Felicity opened her mouth to snap at this stranger that not every relationship was based on who was jumping in whose pants, strange as that might sound to him.

He must have realized that he was in for a verbal bitch slap, because he quickly amended. “I didn’t mean it like that, that came out wrong. I just mean that you and Tommy seem like very different people, that’s all. I was curious how you guys met.”

Felicity plugged the laptop into the cable and reached for her headphones, staying silent. He was absolutely right. She and Tommy were very different people, and Felicity was reminded of it every day. She just didn’t need this man picking up on it.

“Okay, this isn’t going well. Let’s start again. I would love to know how you and my best friend became acquainted.” Despite his almost mocking formality, he sounded distinctly uncomfortable, and Felicity felt gratified, suddenly absolutely certain that he hadn’t _meant_ to be a dick.

“I better not hear another wild story involving vodka and an umbrella,” he said teasingly, after a little bit of a pause.

Felicity smiled against her will. Aware of it or not, purposeful or not, her boss was kind of a dick. However, he seemed to be a particular brand of perceptive dick who could startle a smile out of her, and the only other person who could do that was...Tommy. It made sense, and it warmed her to him.  

“Nothing as exciting as that, I’m afraid. Ask Tommy, he tells it better than I do.”

Oliver made a noncommittal noise of assent, but Felicity knew he really was going to pester Tommy about it. He likely would also fish around for an explanation of how and why she was blind, because he didn’t seem to have done so already for some reason. What he didn’t know was that he’d be hearing the same story for both, and it wasn’t a story she was in the mood of telling. She’d need a lot more alcohol for that.

“I’m gonna fix your laptop. I need to put on my headphones to do that, okay?”

“Yeah, go ahead. Thanks.” His voice was lower, as if he was distracted or lost in thought, and Felicity felt an inexplicable sense of frustration. The inflection he put on his words was flatter than most people's. He paused after the verbal cues most people felt the need to fill and seemed to jump from one emotion to another without any kind of prompt or warning she might pick up on. _Gah._ This guy was already driving her _nuts_.

A minute later, she pulled her headphones off. “There, it’s fixed.”

“Just like that?”

“Charging it helps,” she responded mildly.

“Ah. Got it. Thanks again.” And just like that, there was a laugh in his voice. How could he do that so quickly, go from laughing to being serious to laughing again? And it didn’t help that he was laughing _at her_ \- or at the fact that they both knew fully well that he hadn’t really needed help with his laptop.

She turned to him. “Anything else I can help you with?”

“I think I’m good for now. But I will _definitely_ let you know if there’s anything else you can _help_ me with.”

Felicity deliberately ignored how sleazy that sounded, and handed him back his laptop. “You can keep this cable, but consider this me putting in an official request for new ones. I gave out half of mine to the guys in finance last month when they fried their systems.”  

“I’m sure your supervisor could take care of that,” he responded, suddenly businesslike. Again, she marveled at how quickly he flipped the switch. One second he was acting like a bro-type fratboy, insinuating that he’d call her up for some _favors,_ and the next he was Mr. Queen, CEO of Queen Consolidated, telling a lower level employee to contact her supervisor.

“My supervisor is an idiot.” The bitterness in her voice startled even her, and she prayed he wouldn’t pick up on it. Criticizing her supervisor to the CEO of the company didn’t exactly reflect well on her as a model employee. While Oliver Queen didn’t seem to be a typical CEO, he _was_ still her boss, and it would be stupid of her to forget it.

“Ah. I’ll see what I can do.”  

“Thanks,” Felicity mumbled, her desire from earlier that morning to throw herself off a cliff and never return to work coming back full force.

Oliver tapped his foot against the ground, clearly a nervous habit. Felicity tried to picture him standing there, tried to imagine his face and what he was wearing, what he looked like. She had estimated that he was about 6 feet tall, based on where is voice originated from, but beyond that...nothing. The closest she ever came to ‘seeing’ someone’s face since she had become blind was when her friend Iris had let her feel her face for a minute. Asking her boss if she could do that to him would probably be a _little_ untoward. Oddly enough, the thought made her face heat up.

“I will see you around, Ms. Smoak. Thanks for the assistance.”

She listened to his retreating steps with the smallest of smiles. Somehow, the raging headache from earlier had dulled and she hadn’t even noticed. She didn’t really think much about the encounter for the rest of the day, save for embarrassment upon remembering that she had told him that her supervisor was an idiot.

Hours later, after returning from a bathroom break at the end of that day, Felicity found a big box by her desk. Her fingers found a note in Braille attached to the side of the box. _“New cables, as per your request.  NOT courtesy of your supervisor.”_  

 

* * *

 

Not knowing exactly why he was doing something was unusual for Oliver Queen. He figured he had explored that enough while spending most of his teens and early twenties not having a clue which direction his life was heading in, and that got him to some fucked up places. He wasn’t very eager to make the same mistakes again.

But Oliver also believed in paying attention to his instincts. It was faulty logic, but most of the time, his instincts made sense. But not always. He didn’t really know for example, why he’d wanted to see the blonde again badly enough that he’d been willing to pretend he didn’t have two braincells to rub together for warmth.  Nor did he have any idea why he went to the trouble to put in a rush order for a box of cables with the urgency of getting a woman in labor to the hospital. Why he had begun to look for a convenient reason to shift one particular supervisor in IT to a different department could be more easily explained away than the others - the man really was incompetent - but the truth that had prompted him looking into that remained happily senseless.  

But he had done all of that. And he felt surprisingly good about it.

About as good as he felt about inviting Tommy over without any apparent reason, with a clear mind to ask him more about Felicity Smoak.

After a dinner that was full of laughter and the kind of light mood that didn’t often grace the inside of the Queen Mansion, Thea went out and for once Oliver didn't purse his lips at the thought of it. He was getting better at that. He also had something to look forward to.

“So, Tommy…”

Tommy turned to him, one eyebrow raised.

“ _So_ , Oliver…”

“Felicity Smoak. How’d you guys meet? I asked her about it, and she acted like I was asking her to hand over some classified documents from the State Department.”

“Wait, you spoke to Felicity again?” Tommy sounded almost alarmed by the idea.

“She IS my employee, I needed to ask her an important question about official QC business. It’s standard.”

“Did this official QC business include asking her for her phone number?”  

Oliver made a face. “No, man. I’m just curious. She _is_ your friend, and it would be weird if we didn’t at least acknowledge each other’s existence.”

Tommy laughed. “You and Felicity are the same. Both so territorial over me, I’m honored.”

Oliver rolled his eyes. “Yeah, sure. Whatever. Tell me how you met her, and I promise not to tell her about the time my mom saw you with no pants on.”

Tommy snorted. “Oh, I told her about that already. You got nothing, Queen.”

“What’s the big deal about telling me how you met the blind girl?”

To Oliver’s shock, Tommy’s face suddenly contorted with anger. “Don’t...don’t call her that. She’s not just a blind girl. That’s offensive.”

“Okay, you’re right, I’m sorry.”

The silence between the stretched enough to become a little uncomfortable, until Tommy sighed and leaned forward. The expression on his face resembled guilt, and both Oliver’s curiosity and a strange sense of dread were piqued.

“Remember the only time I went to Vegas in my life? 6 years ago?”

“Yeah, you came home looking like your grandmother had died. I thought you partied too hard. Did something happen in Vegas?” The wheels in Oliver’s mind were spinning.

“I got this crappy muscle car from a rental. Wanted the ‘full Vegas experience’ or whatever.” The sneer on Tommy’s face was about as loathing as anything Oliver had ever seen there, and it was all directed at himself. “Went and slammed it right into the side of a tiny Volvo. It was an accident. I wasn’t drunk. But it was still my fault.”

Tommy wiped his hand over his forehead. Oliver was beginning to understand why he hadn’t wanted to talk about it.

“I got out of the car. I was fine, of course. Just a scratch on my ear. But the girl in the car, she...she wasn’t fine. She’d hit her head on the steering wheel real bad, and she was bruised and bleeding all over the place.”

Oliver didn’t really need the rest of this story to be told, but he couldn’t stop the words that spilled from his friend’s mouth.

“She seemed fine, at first. They said she would be fine.” Tommy gulped, trying to swallow down his emotions and clear his voice at the same time. “And then she wasn’t.”

Tommy took a deep breath. Oliver waited.

“There was this huge shitstorm. My dad wanted to make sure I wasn’t gonna get in trouble. I couldn't give less of a fuck about that. Ended up spending that whole month in the hospital with her.”

“They call it cortical blindness. She hit her head so hard that she had a brain hemorrhage. They thought once it stopped, her vision would go back to normal. It didn’t. It happens, apparently.” There was something borderline cruel about chance translating into someone’s tragedy, and all of it being explained away with the words ‘it happens’.

“She was a mess. She had been headed to MIT on a full ride scholarship, and she thought she wouldn’t be able to code anymore. She thought she had lost everything, and it was my fault.” Tommy’s eyes shone as he looked at Oliver, his knuckles almost white where he was holding on to the untouched tumbler. “Remember what we were like at sixteen? Two idiots with no idea what we were doing? She was the opposite. Brilliant, determined, a fucking genius on a scholarship, and I almost ruined that.”

“And she wasn’t angry at me. I introduced myself right away as ‘the guy who rammed into your car’, and she asked if _I_ was okay. She was miserable, but she still made an effort to talk to me whenever I was there. Which was all the time.”

“And you became friends?” Oliver couldn’t quite manage to keep his surprise out of his voice.

“Of course we became friends. I was one of the only visitors she ever had in that goddamned hospital, and she always liked to talk. But I was the lucky one. She was the brilliant, funny girl who got stuck with the asshole who blinded her for a friend.”

“I tried to help her as much as I could when she got out, but her mom and her friend took over, and of course they weren’t thrilled I was around all the time. Her mom thought I was some creep, an older guy trying to be friends with her 16 year old daughter, and her friend despised - and still despises - rich white dudebros. “ Oliver winced, but something about that thought seemed to cheer Tommy up, even if just a little. “Man, I should warn Felicity not to let Iris meet you.”

“We’ve both grown out of that, Tommy.” Oliver admitted with a sigh. One of the simpler truths he could give, these days.

“Come on, man. Don’t tell me you haven’t been putting on the dudebro airs for Felicity.” Grinning, Tommy handed Oliver his phone. A text from Felicity was open on the screen. _Your friend Mr. Queen reminds me of the version of you that still haunts my nightmares._

Oliver rolled his eyes. “Oh, please. I don’t know what she’s on about. I kept it down, I promise. I just told her that I asked you if you guys were sleeping together.”

“You told her you asked me that? Jeez, making a real good impression there, telling her about your own dickheadedness. You’re like a kid that walks up to his mom and says “look, Mommy, I pooped my pants” all proudly.”

“Are you comparing Felicity to my mom?”

“Maybe slightly.” Tommy grinned.

“How did Felicity end up working in my company anyway?” Oliver asked. “She seems way overqualified for the job, by the way. I see what you meant about Applied Sciences.”

Tommy winced. “Yikes. She got really pissed that I told you that. Just pretend you never heard that.”

“She wants to work her way up by herself, I got that much even before I took a look at her file.”

“You looked at her file?”

Oliver took disbelief in his friend’s voice in stride. “I’m CEO. I want to know who works for me. Of course I looked at her file.”

Tommy raised his hands in surrender. “Yup. Sure. Not creepy at all.”

“I didn’t mean to be a creep…..okay, that _is_ kind of creepy, don’t tell her I did that.”

“Something tells me she’s going to find out about it, and you’re going to be in the doghouse. And I’m going to leave you there.”

Oliver scowled, but without heat behind it. “Good to know you have my back.”

Tommy’s mirth seemed to settle into something more genuine. “I’ll always have your back. I missed five years of pointless gossip with you. No point in wasting any more time.”

“We do have a lot to catch up on, don't we?” There was years’ worth of things that they could talk about… and Oliver found himself reminded starkly in this moment, that no matter how much he wanted to reconnect with his life and his friends, there were things that he could never share with them.

Tommy leaned forward, elbows on his knees and eyes alight all of a sudden. “You know that dingy bar we used to go to - the one with…”

“The best tequila in Starling.” Oliver almost groaned the words out, rubbing a hand down his face. He couldn’t keep the smile off his face. “That’s about the clearest thing I remember about the place.”

Tommy’s laugh rang out. “Yeah well, I remember that being the point. And they’ve recently reopened”

Oliver didn’t really need more than that and Tommy’s eyebrows wiggling in invitation to get where this was going. And really, why not?  Because out of all the things that he couldn’t share with his best friend, a drink for old time’s sake in their favorite bar sure as hell wasn’t one of them.

“Let’s get going.”

Tommy clapped his hands and almost jumped to his feet. “Anyone else you wanna extend the invitation to?”

“Not this time. Let’s go.”

  
The two of them left the house together and walked out into the night the way they had done too many times before to count.

Everything had changed, but nothing had.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We plan to update every Sunday by 9pm. Comments and reviews are welcome and feed our muse! 
> 
> Find us on Tumblr:  
> honorthedeadbyfighting.tumblr.com  
> yellowflicker09011996.tumblr.com


	3. Chapter 3

It wasn’t often that Oliver trained in an actual gym. It was too spacious, too brightly lit, and he hated the mirrors in every corner and that always made him feel like he was being watched. But ever since he was almost kidnapped in the Glades and put down his attacker singlehandedly and with ease, it had been useless to try to hide his physicality from his bodyguard. Admittedly, there were still limits to what Oliver was willing to do in front of said bodyguard, but old-fashioned boxing was well within these limits.

 

It wasn’t Oliver’s favorite way of blowing off steam, but he couldn't deny that there was something satisfying about the way his bare knuckles hit the punching bag, the way his strength reverberated up his arms and burned his joints. He landed one hit after another. The hard surface did not give, but it yielded enough to make it feel real. Enough to remind him of what it felt to have bones crack beneath his best weapon, his hands. Enough to take him away from the gym, and back to a darker place.

 

Oliver stepped back and shook out his hands, jumping from one foot to the other. He was breathing hard and had to blink a couple of times to get back to the brightly lit gym.

 

“Got something against taping your hands, Queen?”

 

Oliver tensed. He knew that even voice, and he even knew the ‘done with you’ tone well enough by now. He turned, easing a smile on his face that was about as genuine as Diggle’s unaffected look.

 

“Couldn't find the tape anywhere,” he said with a shrug. He hadn’t actually looked long enough for that to be a viable truth, but Oliver didn’t really feel like sharing that information. It didn’t look like Digg cared either, especially as he threw the warm towel at Oliver’s head.

 

“People don’t really like seeing blood on their punching bags, Queen,” he deadpanned. Surprised, Oliver turned to investigate the droplets of blood. He looked down at his hands in consternation. He hadn't even felt the pain of his knuckles splitting. .

 

Oliver swiftly cleaned both the punching bag and his own hands, and threw the towel away and turned to Diggle.

 

“Want to go a couple of rounds?”

 

Diggle sighed. “You’ve been here two hours, Oliver.” Despite this, he was already stepping closer to the ring, seemingly resigned that he couldn’t change Oliver’s mind.

 

“I didn’t really notice,” Oliver said,  jumping up and down in place in an unnecessary warmup. He liked sparring with a decent opponent, and Diggle was as good as any.

 

“I’m starting to get the feeling that you never do, Oliver.”

 

Those were the last words they spoke for some time. They circled and attacked each other. Oliver could almost see the moves Diggle would make as if he was telegraphing them. There were echoes in the way he chose where to hit and how hard that reminded Oliver of the way an old friend of Oliver’s had used to move.

 

When 7am came around, Oliver stepped back.

 

“I gotta shower and get to the office. You gonna go home to your wife?”

 

“The day you tell me about your feelings is the day I give you permission to ask me about my wife, Queen.”  

 

“Okay, here are my feelings: I fucking hate being CEO of Queen Consolidated and would gladly hand over my position to the janitor.”

 

Diggle paused, looking at him curiously. “Something happen?”

 

Oliver considered that. Something had been happening for a long time. He just wasn’t sure he wanted to talk to Diggle about it. Yet. Oliver was very well aware that it was getting to the point that he couldn’t _not_ talk to Diggle about certain things - things such as the disaster of the five years that he’d spent away from Starling City.

 

“You know, whatever it is, I doubt that training till you’re close to passing out is the solution,” Diggle said calmly. Oliver felt an itch at the back of his neck that had more to do with the fact that Diggle was pointing out the undeniable truth and less to do with the drying sweat on his body.

 

“I gotta get back to the office,” Oliver responded.

 

Diggle sighed. “Okay, you don’t have to talk to me. I just think you should talk to _someone_ , that’s all.”

 

“Yeah, you and my mother.”

 

“She’s not wrong.”

 

“She’s not _right_ either. I’m gonna go talk to someone. I’ll talk to the moronic investors who I’m meeting with today.”

 

“Have fun with that

 

Oliver snorted and walked out. Despite the way his idea of ‘fun’ had changed over the years, talking finance with Adam Hunt still wouldn't even approach its vicinity. . He had too much to worry about in QC, and entitled pains in the neck who tried to tell him how to run his own company weren’t people he wanted to ever breathe the same air as.

 

Speaking of his other worries in QC, he made a mental note to remember to recheck the computer systems. The CEO wanting remote access to his own company’s servers shouldn’t raise any eyebrows. The inconsistencies he was worried about were surprisingly weighing more on his head than anything else had. It would definitely be the first time that QC’s troubles trumped personal ones.

 

Suddenly, 7 am seemed too early. The day was stretching out endlessly in front of him, and he had far too much work to do.  He got in the shower with a looming sense of resignation behind him.

 

* * *

 

 It was rare for Felicity to wake up to the scent of fresh coffee, but it was a nice surprise when it did happen - more for the fact that it meant that Iris West had slept over than for the coffee itself.

 

The thought put a smile on her face. Felicity adored Iris, and she wasn’t afraid to admit it to anyone. Or to tell it to them off loudly if they insulted Iris’s work as a journalist.  

 

Felicity rolled out of bed and straight into her slippers. She followed the sounds of Iris messing around in her kitchen until she was standing by the door to the kitchen.

 

“Oh, you really love me a lot.”

 

Iris chuckled low. “Sometimes.”

 

“Please! There’s fresh coffee on the pot, and are those eggs I smell? You adore me.”

 

“I adore you better when you don’t leave me alone with Tommy Merlyn in a room.”

 

Felicity laughed, and then felt along the edge of the table until she found her stool and sat down. She heard the click of her favorite mug when Iris put it in front of her.

 

“You know, he’s not this monster that you think he is. I feel like we have this argument once a week.”

 

“Yeah, because he keeps his dickishness down around you. But you leave me at the table with him, and don’t think I don’t know you do that on purpose, Smoak, and he spends twenty minutes speculating on the color of my panties.”

 

Iris’s voice getting clearer alerted Felicity to the fact that she had turned more fully to face her.

 

“I think he takes lessons. I mean, you can’t be _that_ obnoxious by birth. It’s impossible. I don’t get why you’re friends with him, honestly.”

 

“I’m not always the best at ‘splitting my time’ or whatever, but Tommy was there for me when I...he’s my friend. You were there too, you of all people should understand why that’s not changing. Why do we get back to talking about him every time you’re here if you really hate him that much?”

 

“Uh uh, we’re not going there. Moving on. How’s work?”

 

“You first,” Felicity said, rubbing her forehead. When they were teenagers, Felicity’s mother had once observed that she and Iris were very well matched - strong, intelligent, funny, and quick witted enough to keep up with each other, in a way that ensured that nobody else would ever be able to follow their conversations due to the rapid shifts in topic. It really was as though they had their own language, despite speaking English very eloquently.

 

“You’ll read how my work was in the paper,” Iris teased.

 

“The day Starling City News has the grace to print papers in Braille is the day I’ll read their goddamn newspaper,” Felicity retorted.

 

“The day I get enough pull, I’ll have them record every news article in full and put it on their website. I promise.”

 

The chair scraped the tiles and Iris sits down, putting down the plates of food. Felicity took a deep breath and grabbed her fork. Fantastic way to start the day, having yet another conversation that reminded her just how much the world wasn’t made for people who couldn’t see.

 

“How’s work going?” Iris asked cheerfully.

 

“Work has been… complicated.”

 

“Your asshole supervisor been getting to you again?”

 

“No, actually. He’s been surprisingly _bearable_ since...well, never mind. It’s just that I’ve noticed something in QC’s systems, and I don’t know if I should say anything. And if I _do_ say something, who should I say it to? Ugggggg,” Felicity said.

 

“What do you mean, you noticed something? What have you noticed?” Iris asked, her voice a mixture of curiosity and concern. Iris always had that way of letting Felicity know that she was listening raptly to everything she said.

 

“You know how every company has independent servers to sustain its internal data, right? And QC’s is excellent - I know, because I practically upgraded the thing on my own not six months ago. And now some guy in finance blows his software and loses data, I go up there to retrieve it, and I find ghosts everywhere.”

 

“No tech speak to the journalist, babe,” Iris reminded her.

 

“It’s like… you know that when data passes through a system, it never really goes away. There are traces of every movement of money those guys make, it’s like a backup file. But ghosts are the traces you find that don't really have any data to back them up. It’s like… finding a shadow on the sidewalk, but with nothing there to cut off the light, you know?”

 

Felicity could practically hear Iris’s keen journalist senses perking up. “Are you saying they erased money transfers so that they wouldn't show up in the books?”

 

Felicity shrugged. “I don't know. I know what computers tell me.”

 

“So why don’t you tell someone in the company? Not your supervisor, I don’t know. Some higher up?”

 

“The problem is that I don’t know who is in on this. Whatever shadiness is going on, there is probably more than one person involved. Plus, there are only a handful of people with the kind of access to do this, and they’re all the so called ‘higher ups.’” Felicity sighed.

 

“And it’s not just the financial records. Most of the ghost-data isn’t even about money. I haven’t pieced it together yet, but I have a bad feeling about this.”

 

“Felicity?” Iris’s voice was suddenly serious.

 

“Yeah?”

 

“When you dig deeper into this - and I know you will, because you’re _you,_ just be careful, okay? QC is a huge corporation, and this could be a bigger deal than it might seem at first.”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“You know that QC hasn't exactly been on stable ground since Oliver Queen took over as CEO. Its stock has been all over the place, and hearing the guys from the financial columns, at this point it needs to get to something big or consider a merger. They always exaggerate, because financial reporters love the sound of their own voices, but be careful anyway, kay?”

 

“What if Mr. Queen himself is the one behind whatever it is that’s going on?”

 

“Not Queen.” The surety behind Iris’s voice as she spoke surprised Felicity.

 

“What makes you so sure?”

 

“Guys who donate almost all their money to various charities without publicizing it don’t pull crap in their own companies. He might not be the best CEO, but he’s not a crook. I’d be prepared to bet half my savings on it.”

 

Felicity was silent for a few beats. “I didn’t know he donated anything other than what the QC’s PR carefully releases. And nobody knows who he is since he came back to Starling.”

 

Iris laughed. “You know, I can’t believe you don’t know anything about this guy. He’s your boss. He’s also your best friend’s other best friend. I sympathize with him there.”

 

“You know I don’t listen to the gossip at work, and Tommy doesn’t talk about him.” For some reason, Felicity didn’t feel like mentioning her own previous interactions with Mr. Queen.

 

“Well, my editor asked a coworker of mine to put together a piece on him, and from what I’ve heard floating around, he _really_ doesn’t seem like the kind of guy to be involved in any shit. Not since his return, anyway. If you plan on telling anyone, I’d suggest you bring it straight to him. It’s just my instinct.”

 

“I trust your instincts, but I’m still going to make sure I’m right about this before I stir up anything. I work in IT, I’m not exactly in the position to start making accusations left and right.”

 

“Smart. Watch your ass.”

 

“I can’t _watch_ anything. You watch it for me.”

 

“I’ll always be watching your ass. I do it better than any creepy construction worker can, girl.”

 

“How do we somehow always end up talking about my ass? I feel like we get into this every day,” Felicity said with a laugh. “And you’re the one who complains about Tommy!”

 

“I have _permission_ to talk about your ass. And we talk about it whenever we’re trying to pretend we don’t have to leave for work in twenty minutes.” Iris stood up.

 

“Twenty minutes? Fuck, I’m going to be late,” Felicity stood up too quickly, and tried to grab the table to prevent herself from falling. Instead, she made contact with Iris’s hand, which steadied her. She had learned to stop groping around in a panic to reorient herself every time she stood up, but sometimes, especially in the morning, she had to be careful.  

 

“Do you want help?” Iris asked.

 

“I think I’m good, Belle helped me re-coordinate my closet a couple days ago. Can you just make sure my dog didn’t knock my keys over?  

 

“Sure.”

 

* * *

 

 Sitting in his office at QC, Oliver furrowed his brow at the computer. He wasn’t an expert at computers, but he wasn’t useless either - and something _really_ wasn’t adding up. Combing through the QC mainframe was no joke. The amount of data he had to go through was staggering, but it helped that Oliver knew what he was looking for.

 

His father’s list had made it easier for him when it came to narrowing down the names and years in which several deals had been made. It made looking for the money trails left behind easier. It was almost like following the map of a ghost.

 

The problem was that he was the only one who was supposed to be in possession of this map. And he kept detecting someone else going over the same virtual passageways he had been combing over, looking up the same folders and dates for the same things. That was not good at all.

 

It could mean one of two things: his poking around had been detected, and someone was following his footsteps trying to get to what he knew, or someone else was nosing their way around in QC’s backdoor deals. Oliver wasn’t sure which one was a worse scenario. On the upside, he didn’t care much for anyone coming after him for this. At least he’d have a name and a face to go after this time.

 

If someone else was looking into this for the reasons he was, however, they had to be stopped for a very simple reason: every single name on that list he’d followed that got him to this point belonged to a very dangerous person. They were ruthless people with the means to hurt and torture, and Oliver doubted very much that whoever had been poking around in QC servers had the same abilities he did when it came to defending themselves.

 

A quick glance at the time made him purse his lips unhappily. It was almost 6:00pm. If he didn’t leave immediately, he’d be late for dinner _again_ and he’d never hear the end of it from Thea or his mother.

 

Oliver sighed and opened the newly installed program on his desktop, starting up the download to his phone. As the program uploaded, he connected it to the alert system he had installed at home. If anyone would access the company mainframe in any kind of way, his personal computer would register the entry and his phone would alert him. It didn’t make him feel any better about what was going on, but at least it was a step in doing something about it.

 

\------

 

Dinner with his family was as strange an affair as usual. Oliver was getting better at being around people just for the sake of company, but sometimes he had to remind himself to relax his posture, give the truth when he was asked innocuous questions, and not treat every conversation like a game of chess.

 

Thea helped. They had gotten to a point where they’d admitted that fighting to get back to how they used to be was pointless, so getting to know who she was now and letting her in one inch at a time actually made the Queen mansion feel a bit more like home every time.

 

It had become a kind of a new tradition, spending a few hours with her after every family dinner before going to bed. She’d tell him about her life, meaningless details that filled her day, and it would help him relax.

 

He still eyed his own bed like it was the enemy, but he didn’t think that was going to change anytime soon.

 

It took hours of lying on his back in the dark before he fell asleep, but eventually he must have, because the next thing Oliver knew was a sharp beeping close to his head yanking him awake.

 

He jerked upright and reached for his phone immediately.

 

And there it was - the intrusion-alert that he had installed not six hours ago. It was going off, at 3am. Who was accessing QC’s mainframe at three in the fucking morning?

 

Oliver got up so fast that he had to take a moment to adjust to the rush of blood to his head. He got dressed as fast as he ever had. He was going to go over to QC and get to the bottom of this, _right now_.

 

* * *

 

 Felicity’s heart was beating in her chest so fast, she thought it might choke her. If she was caught, she’d lose everything. QC’s mainframe was a very restricted part of the building, and a lowly tech employee had no business being there. Despite her adrenalin from fear of getting caught, her hands were steady as she moved over the controls of the mainframe, counting in her head. Ignoring and overcoming the physical manifestations of fear to get the job done anyway was something she had excelled at since she became blind.

 

One, the main directory. Two, the exit plug for the back-up servers. She could envision the servers perfectly in her mind, as though her eyes were functioning. Her fingers counted and saw for her. Three, four, five - there it was!

 

She reached for the cord and plugged it in, connecting her tablet to the servers. The tracing and copying program she had built from scratch for this very specific purpose activated automatically and started downloading.

 

Her knees were starting to ache and she was starting to feel the chill, despite being dressed warmly enough to be in the belly of a building in the middle of the winter. She ignored it. She needed to get this done, and fast, before the guard on patrol found her here. Her ears were perked up, waiting for the sound of someone coming, despite knowing full well that if someone was close enough for her to hear, she was toast anyway.

 

She kept running her fingers to check the download progress along the line of the little device that she could attach to all her tech, which was essentially a Braille printer. There was a small and too-rational-for-breaking-and-entering part of her brain that still couldn't believe she was doing this, but the rest of her was dead set on following it through.

 

She knew enough to know that if this was what she thought it was, QC was in with the worst kind of people, and she was possibly working for a corporation that dabbled in organised crime or worse. Money laundering notwithstanding, Felicity couldn't stand by and watch something potentially really bad happen without at least trying to do something about it.

 

Something cracked in the distance and Felicity jumped, a shiver going up her spine. It was hard to hear clearly with the whirring of the servers in the background, but that was definitely the rhythmic sounds of footsteps approaching.

 

Frack!

 

The little Braille reader alerted her that the download was complete. She pulled the cord from the servers, stuffed it back in her bag along with her tablet, and scrambled up in attempt to get to the small desk crammed in the corner of the room.

 

She had thought this through carefully in the safety of her apartment. Pretending that she was there for a routine check after hours had sounded like the most plausible idea, despite the fact that the area was so restricted. She could scramble the brain of whoever was walking up that hallway with some tech-speak, explain how the only time to run these kinds of diagnostics was at night when nobody was crowding the system. She had it all planned out in her head… and she was still shaking.

 

She might have been able to clear a blackjack table once, but bluffing had never been her forte.

 

_Too late to back out now, Smoak_.

 

The door opened, scrapping a little against the floor. Felicity tried to remain impassive.

 

“Hey! This is a restricted area, who are you and what are you doing here?”

 

Right. Felicity straightened her shoulders. She knew lying worked best when you sounded like you believed what was coming out of your mouth.

 

“I’m an employee of this company, I work in IT and I needed to access this mainframe without others clogging this system.” She handed him her badge.  

 

“This is a restricted area of Queen Consolidated, Miss….Smoak. I’m going to ask you one more time: what are you doing here? You have thirty seconds to answer before I call the cops and alert the board of directors that we have an intruder.”

 

Felicity cleared her throat. “I have permission to be here. I had to run a routine PAN tests on the main servers of the company. That’s a five-tier scanning mechanism with protocols that rotate every hour, on the hour. I can’t do that while anyone is working here, it would shut down every computer in the building.”

 

“15 seconds, Miss Smoak. _Who gave you permission to be here_?”

 

Felicity swallowed, and in those three seconds her mind was whirring with all the ways she should have answered, all the things she should have said. There was no way out of this situation that didn’t involve knocking the guard unconscious and fleeing the country.

 

“Miss Smoak. 5 seconds. Who gave you permission?”

 

“I did.” The sound of Oliver Queen’s confident voice echoed across the room.

 

* * *

 

 Oliver wasn’t a man easily surprised, but he had to admit that when he had gone on his bike 15 minutes earlier and drove at breakneck speed to QC, he hadn’t been expecting this.

 

_This_ meaning Felicity Smoak, Tommy’s friend and the employee he had specifically researched only days before, accessing QC’s framework to follow the same tech breadcrumbs he had been following.

 

He stood in the doorway for a minute, listening to her explaining something tech-y to the guard who had caught her. She was obviously lying - Oliver didn’t have to know her real reason for being in QC to know that. The voice she was using now was very different from the ‘I know what I’m doing, stop telling me how to do my job’ voice that she’d used with him a few days before.

 

Instead of bristling with irritation, she sounded….anxious and _afraid,_ and could barely hide it. One thing he could be sure of at this point: Felicity Smoak was the worst liar he ever came across. His instincts told him that of the two scenarios he had imagined when he first discovered someone else poking through the systems, this was what he had been more afraid of. She had discovered the same discrepancies he had, and was putting herself in danger in more than one way to get to the bottom of it.

 

It was this realization that had him opening the door and striding in.

 

“Miss Smoak. 5 seconds. Who gave you permission?”

Oliver braced himself, and began to walk across the space to where the guard was standing, bearing down on Felicity.

 

“I did.”

 

They both startled in different ways at the sound of his voice. The guard who had been pointing the flashlight at her face  - quite pointlessly, but without realizing it - turned it on him. Oliver squinted.

 

“Could you put that away, please? There’s no need for it.”

 

“Mr. Queen. This is a restricted access area, and I found this woman - “

 

“Good, you recognize me. I asked Miss Smoak to look into something for me, and gave her permission to be here. I now realize that I should have gone through more official channels to do so, but no harm done, right?”

 

The man looked uncertain between taking him at his word and arguing back to the company’s CEO. In the end, his sense of self-preservation won out and he nodded in acceptance. Oliver had found that in most cases, it usually did.

 

But then there were cases like Felicity Smoak, where nothing seemed to make sense.

 

“Can you give me and Miss Smoak a few minutes, please? I assure you, nobody else will be able to access the mainframe while I’m standing here.”

 

The guard nodded and walked out, tossing an apologetic look towards Felicity. Oliver sympathized with him. Not knowing that she was blind caused people to arrive to some strange conclusions.

 

The moment the door closed, Oliver turned to face her and this time, he waited. A small, and rather unkind part of him, was wondering if she’d try to lie to him too, but that seemed more unlikely by the minutel.

 

To his surprise, she didn’t say anything. He walked closer to her, squinting in the dim light, and then he understood. Her hands were shaking badly - and his presence and saving her from the guard had apparently done nothing to relieve her fear.

 

“You can relax, Felicity. He’s gone and this won’t be going anywhere.” Oliver said, trying to keep his voice as low and smooth as possible.

 

“I didn’t need your help,” she said, exhaling slowly. There was no real anger behind it, and she still seemed to be recovering from her nerves, but it incited something in Oliver.

 

“Oh yeah, you totally had that handled. Two seconds away from being hauled in a cop car to an interrogation room and fired for misconduct.”

 

“I would have found a way.”

 

Oliver laughed incredulously. “Okay, so try it with me. Explain what you’re doing here in a way that wouldn’t potentially land you in jail.”

 

“Or what, you’ll fire me?” Felicity said. She sounded tired.

 

“No. But judging by the alert that I set up, you’ve been digging into something that I have an interest in, and I’d like to know what you found.”

 

The way she reacted to that was impossible to miss. Her hands clenched over the table and her pulse sped up. It wasn’t hard to guess why - she was afraid of him.

 

The realization filled him with a feeling of dread and self loathing so acute, it surprised him. He wanted to run away from her, to remove himself from her life for causing her fear. It also reminded him of the fact that she was now in danger - and she needed to know it.  

 

“I’m not trying to get you into trouble, you know,” he said, carefully. “But I think you’ve realized by now that the kind of information you found in those files could get you in trouble with the wrong kind of people.”

 

“Yeah, but I’m more worried about you being ‘ _those kind of people_ ’ right now.” she admitted tremulously.  

 

Oliver took a deep breath.

 

“You don’t really have any reason to believe I’m not. Just like I had no real reason to vouch for you earlier. I guess we’ll both have to take it on faith.”

 

To his surprise, Felicity expelled a long breath and with it, the tension that had gathered along the line of her shoulders seemed to dissipate slightly. She slouched on her chair and rubbed her eyes with the tips of her fingers.

 

“I believe you. I don’t know why I do. But if you’re lying to me, run. I’ll destroy your company and I’ll bring you down with it. That’s a threat, in case you were wondering.”

 

Oliver smiled. “So, you believe me. Does this mean you’re going to help me?”

 

“Lets not get ahead of ourselves here.”

 

“I could really use your help. And you could probably use mine, considering the almost-disaster that happened tonight when you tried to do this on your own.”

 

She seemed to consider his words, her blank eyes staring somewhere past him. “If I do this, you can’t tell Tommy.”

 

Those were not the words Oliver had been expecting to hear. “Why would I tell Tommy that I suspect there’s some fuckery going on in my company?”

 

“Why wouldn’t you?” Felicity countered.

 

“Fair point. Tommy will continue believing that I never talk to you. Your secret is safe with me.”

 

Felicity nodded. “And yours is safe with me. Not that I have anyone to tell. Or that I would. Because, you know, you could fire me. Not that I think….”

 

Oliver laughed, and Felicity pressed her lips together, like she was visibly biting back the words. She got cute when she was nervous.

 

“So, partners then?”

 

“If we must, I suppose.”

 

Pushing aside the qualms he had about the danger she’d be in by continuing to pursue this with him, Oliver grinned. The vaguely hostile response seemed forced. Felicity Smoak was warming up to him.

  
Sort of.

**Author's Note:**

> We plan to update every Sunday by 9pm. Comments and reviews are welcome and feed our muse! 
> 
> Find us on Tumblr:   
> honorthedeadbyfighting.tumblr.com   
> yellowflicker09011996.tumblr.com


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